To Dream of the Dead (25 page)

Jim was on his own at the top till.

‘Hell, Merrily, you’re looking . . .’

‘Knackered?’

‘Let’s say careworn,’ Jim said.

‘Been a wearing sort of day.’

‘You too? Brenda’s been in bed all afternoon, she has. Touch of migraine.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

Jim sighed, rueful smile.

‘Kind of migraine brought on by proximity to certain folks.’

‘Oh.’

Jim looked from side to side, as if someone might be hovering, and then along the single aisle towards the post office, with its blind down, its big CLOSED sign, its . . . was that a metal cross on the wall?

‘Truth of it is,’ Jim said, ‘that’s another reason Brenda reckons she can’t stick it n’ more. One hand, it’s a good thing having the post office here. Good for business, passing trade. Other hand . . .’

‘Shirley.’

‘When that office shuts, it’s like a bloody weight’s been lifted. I got nothing against religion, as you know, but nine hours a day?’ Jim looked uncertainly at Merrily. She put down a ten-pound note, pointed at the cigarette shelves.

‘This church she goes to, in Leominster . . . she mention that much?’

‘She do, but I don’t listen.’ He picked up the tenner. ‘Wanted me to put a poster up for it. I said, no, we got a good church yere, and a good vicar.’

‘Thank you. How did she react?’

‘Scowled. I said, why’d you wanner go to two churches?’

‘She explain? Sorry, Jim, it’s just I had a strange kind of card from this church. Maybe I should ask her. Try and have a talk.’

Jim laid a packet of Silk Cut on the counter, with Merrily’s change. ‘I wouldn’t do that.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Let her be for a while, I would.’

‘You have a particular reason for saying that?’

‘Well, it . . .’ Jim started fiddling with the biros in his top pocket. ‘It’s clear she’s keepin’ an eye on you. I don’t suppose I’m saying anything you don’t . . .’

‘Priests shouldn’t smoke or have boyfriends? Or enter church when not suitably attired?’

‘Or spurn the meat the Lord has provided,’ Jim said.

‘What?’

‘She was asking me why you never bought meat from us – I don’t know what that’s about. She watches, see. All the time she bloody
watches
. Main thing now is the, er . . . the blasphemous book.’

‘Oh, for God’s
sake
. . . how does she even
know
about that?’

‘Running a post office, you learns everything sooner or later, I reckon. Like a confessional, it is, behind that bulletproof screen. Learns more than’s good for her.’

Well, thank you Amanda, of Ledwardine Livres.

‘That book,’ Jim said. ‘Hole in the front of it?’

‘There is, yes.’

‘All the way down to hell,’ Jim said. ‘Apparently.’

‘And that’s where I’m going, is it?’

‘I’d been thinking I’d be broken up to leave this place,’ Jim said. ‘But mabbe not.’

. . .
a Bible which is presented
to be without error or contradiction
is a dangerous and possibly
harmful weapon in the hands of
fallible and corruptible human beings
.

Stephen Parsons
Ungodly Fear

D
IRTY PINK LIGHT
had fallen on Jane’s face in the bathroom mirror. A drawn and worried face. A face reflecting the awareness that today could actually be more life-and-death crucial than she’d figured.

She’d awoken long before daylight, heartsick about selling out the Coleman’s Meadow Preservation Society – turned against her own people by the disgusting police state. Yet there was a painful logic in Mum’s argument about possibly sheltering someone who thought barbaric violence could further the cause. In the pre-dawn sludge, the slaughter of an old man and the taking of his head was real and frightening, and when she tried to summon the startling excitement of yesterday – the
epiphany
– something else came bobbing up like a cork in a toilet. Something Coops had said, in Coleman’s Meadow last night, about Bill Blore and
Trench One
.

. . .
got it scheduled for early in the next series – and that starts in the New Year
.

As she rolled out of bed, the implications came crunching into place. She had two university interviews set up for late January. If Bill Blore’s programme on Ledwardine was near the start of the new
Trench One
series, then the university guys doing the interviews would almost certainly have seen it.

Seen and heard Jane Watkins talking about Coleman’s Meadow. And they’d remember. As soon as they met her they’d remember. So this just had to be good. Didn’t it? However bad everything else was, she had to make this interview work for her.

By six-thirty, she was dressed and out there. When the dawn came, the signs were not too scary: a salmony sheen on the horizon, no menacing cloudplay. Certainly better than last night’s TV forecast had implied. Jane went to see the river and found him still
dangerously high, brown and racing, clearly recalling what it was like to be young and hungry, and she reminded him that he was part of this, that he’d been around in the Bronze Age when the stones had been erected and Ledwardine had come into being.

She stood on the bridge . . . could lean over the wall and almost touch the rushing water. She needed some of that – his energy. Needed to sound enthusiastic and driven. But in an authoritative way. Not just some kid who’d accidentally stumbled on something of major importance that she didn’t really understand. Because she
did
understand, that was the whole point. She understood what the stones had
meant
. And what they meant now.

‘You OK?’ Mum said over breakfast.

‘Yeah. Fine.’

‘Hmm.’

Mum was in Saturday civvies, jeans with a hole in one knee and an old Gomer Parry Plant Hire sweatshirt.

‘No, really,’ Jane said. ‘I have to go for this, don’t I? The words
bastards
and
don’t let them grind you down
occur.’

‘Erm . . . my advice – not that I’ve ever exactly distinguished myself on TV, as you know, so maybe you can learn from my mistakes – is not to actually think about it too much beforehand. Know more or less what you want to say but don’t rehearse how you’re going to say it.’

‘No, I wouldn’t do that,’ Jane said.

Having just spent twenty minutes mouthing at herself in the mirror.
Bill, I have to say I couldn’t believe it at first. It seemed just too perfect. But over the next couple of days I checked out all the points on the line, and it became clear to me that Coleman’s Meadow must’ve been a
very
significant location. So when the stones were actually found . . . no, I wasn’t too surprised, actually
.

Wondering what the chances were of getting in a mention of Lucy Devenish, as the person who’d awakened in her this heightened awareness of the underlying landscape. Maybe Bill Blore’s crew could get a shot of Lucy’s grave.

‘And don’t arrive too early,’ Mum said, ‘or you’ll just be hanging about in the cold, getting more and more on edge.’

‘It’ll be fine,’ Jane said. ‘Look, I never got around to asking, with
one thing and another, but were you able to check out Mathew Stooke? Like, apart from buying his book?’

‘Who told you about that?’

‘Mum, it’s on the desk. He’s a tosser, isn’t he? Next time I see that bloody Lensi—’

‘No! Don’t mention it. Don’t indicate you know who they are. It’s better if we don’t at this stage.’

‘Why?’

‘Because . . . I don’t know, really, something’s not right. Call it a feeling.’ Mum was admitting to
feelings
now? Be the full Traherne in no time at all. For some reason, Jane felt a little lighter.

‘We seem to be talking all round something here, don’t we?’ And Jane would have pushed harder, but time was short, and she needed to go up to the apartment and figure out what to wear that was casual but authoritative.

‘Go on,’ Mum said. ‘Make yourself look wonderful for the telly.’

In the end, Jane dressed down. Jeans and a big dark sweater. A smudge of make-up. Too glam, too sexy would give the wrong impression. Well,
sexy
was all right, in a
cerebral
way; when Bill Blore interviewed her, there should be a little chemistry. Bill liked women, was renowned for it.

Jane was cool with that.

She drank a mug of tea with extra sugar and Mum told her to break a leg. As she walked across the square, she felt destiny nudging her, the sensation of standing on the cusp of something. The red earth giving up its long-buried secrets, the Dinedor Serpent and the Old Stones of Ledwardine linked by ancient electricity and connecting with Jane’s own nervous system.

In the churchyard, she didn’t spend too long with Lucy, who would surely understand. Pausing only to give the shoulders of the gravestone one squeeze, for luck, before proceeding directly into the dank and dripping orchard.

She imagined a short, lyrical video-sequence of her and Bill following the ley, with music playing underneath – maybe Nick Drake’s ‘Hazey Jane 2’.

The oldest part of the orchard, gnarled and primeval-looking, was loaded with big balls of white-berried mistletoe. Perhaps she’d
come back here before nightfall, with secateurs, and try to reach some. After all, Eirion would be here on Sunday. Feeling kind of turned on now, Jane spun towards the pale light at the end of the orchard, and . . .

Wow
. If she’d thought it was crowded last night . . .

Standing under the exposed waxy sky, she was looking down at something like a reduced rock festival. More tents, an extra caravan, a camper van, the big crane . . . cars parked at all angles, including a police car. Big clusters of people turning Coleman’s Meadow into another village. A separate community had mushroomed overnight.

Jane counted three separate TV units, guys shouldering cameras, and a bunch of other men and women were hanging around the new galvanised gate by a smaller green caravan.

Adrenalin spurting, she ran down to where Neil Cooper was standing, on his own. Fair-haired, wafery Coops, jeans and a canvas shoulder bag – his day off, too, but who’d miss this?

‘Bloody
hell
, Coops, I had no idea there’d be all this . . .’

‘Jane.’ Coops taking Jane’s arm, drawing her away and saying nothing until they were behind the bloated bole of an old oak tree. ‘It’s not quite what you think.’

‘What isn’t?’

‘The media circus. Nothing to do with the excavation.’ Coops shedding his shoulder bag and undoing it. ‘It’s about this.’

Handing her a folded paper.

Jane opened it up. The
Daily Star
was unlikely to be Coops’s usual choice.

But then, it wouldn’t usually carry a picture on its front page of someone as old and boring as the late Clement Ayling under . . .

HEADHUNTERS!
Town hall boss
topped by
pagan nutters

It was as though a fist had come through the paper, smacked her full in the face. Jane stepped back into a puddle.

‘It was the only one left on the rack at your local shop,’ Coops said. ‘But I gather the others are similar.’

She read the whole story, which wasn’t long. The police were quoted as saying that fragments of stone found ‘with the head’ had been confirmed as coming from the Dinedor Serpent, ‘an ancient path which local pagans say is sacred’. But which Clem Ayling, whose body had now been found in the River Wye, had dismissed as ‘patio gravel’. As a result of which, he and his council had been attacked by ‘pagan groups’ and ‘top TV archaeologist Bill Blore’.

‘Oh.’ Jane stepped out of the puddle and handed the paper back to Coops. ‘So now they all want him.’

For one agonising moment she’d thought the headline meant the cops had been acting on stuff from the Coleman’s Meadow database. But, of course, it would’ve been impossible for any of that to make this morning’s papers.

‘Fame rules,’ Coops said.

‘Did you know about these fragments of stone, Coops?’

‘Not a thing. If the police consulted my boss, he hasn’t told me about it.’

‘But like, even if it’s true, how can the cops just say it’s down to pagans? I mean, how
dare
they—?’

‘They probably didn’t. They just let the press run with it. Most of the others seem to have been a bit more restrained than the
Star
.’

‘Where’s Bill Blore now?’

‘Somewhere wishing he’d kept his famous gob shut.’ Coops didn’t look entirely displeased about Blore being caught on the back foot. ‘Shut himself in the site caravan to phone a friend. Always assuming he has one left.’

Jane pondered the implications, looking at her watch. Six minutes to ten.

‘Coops, is this going to affect my interview?’

‘He’s pretty pissed off, Jane. Been here since before eight. Wanted to make a good start while the rain was holding off, and now he can’t. He’s actually—’

Jane heard a few ragged cheers. Coops moved around the oak tree, went to peer over what was left of Lyndon Pierce’s barbed-wire fence. Came back yawning.

‘Looks like he’s coming out. Like some bloody racing driver with his support crew.’

‘Can we watch?’

‘If we must. But look, Jane, when he gets rid of this lot I’d keep away from him for a while if I were you. Don’t push. Let him decide when to remember you.’

‘By which time it’ll be raining again.’

‘Yeah, probably.’

‘And I’ll look like shit.’

Jane looked around for something to kick.

Bill Blore didn’t actually come off the site, went no further than the gate. Leaning over its top rail, wide shoulders hunched under a scratched leather bomber jacket. His thick hair was bound back by some kind of bandanna, his eyes still and steely like ball-bearings, his voice . . . big.

‘All right, you bastards.’

When he raised a hand it was clenched around a flat-bladed trowel, edged with red mud, like he’d been interrupted in the middle of his work.